I'm trying to set my desktop up to occasionally record TV shows with dvr and I'm running into some problems. Here are the TV apps I've tried with the results:

kdetv-works fine
aatv-work fine
v4l-conf-The screen goes black. Everthing is still running as near as I can tell and ctrl+alt+backspace restarts X normally, but the black screen makes it unusable.
me-tv-Error dialogue that says "No tuner device"
effectv-grainy, unstable, black and white video, no sound
xawtv-sound works, no video
xdtv-sound works, gets a black screen like v4lconf. Sound does not turn off after ctrl+alt+backspace.
tvtime-works fine
vdr-nothing in preview window, can hear sound while recording, but nothing when playing back movie.

Of all these, vdr is the only one that I really want working. The rest I installed in an effort to figure out what the problem is (they will likely be uninstalled once I get vdr working). I'd settle for another program that can record TV streams if anyone knows of one, but I'm not interested in using MythTV on this particular box.

I checked dmesg and it shows that my capture card is being autodetected correctly. I am using a Hauppage bt878 capture card on a Debian Lenny system. I've tried everything I know or could find through Google, but I haven't had any luck. Anyone have any ideas?

I gave up and traded for a PVR-150. STILL couldn't get anything to work right, but with a PVR-150 I can use cat to capture the MPEG stream and then compress it later with ffmpeg or mencoder.